OKEECHOBEE – The 2026 Okeechobee Music Festival attracted thousands of visitors to Okeechobee County, March 19-22.

 The first day of the festival, Thursday, March 19 began with a problem at the entrances into Sunshine Grove off 128th Avenue. Festival goers who planned to camp for the weekend had lined up early, which meant hundreds of cars were already in line when the four gates into the festival grounds opened at 10 a.m.  Campers had been given passes with a QR code to indicate which of the four entrances to use and give them directions to the appropriate entrance.

 It wasn’t long before festival goers were taking to social media to complain about how slow the lines were moving.

By early afternoon, some people who had waited in line for 3 or 4 hours  were concerned they would not get into the venue before the Big Wild concert, which was scheduled to begin at 5 p.m.

Meanwhile, Okeechobee County Sheriff’s Office was warning local residents to avoid traveling on U.S. 441 or State Road 70 if possible. “Traffic is extremely congested in multiple areas as Music Fest traffic continues to increase. Highway 70 East, both eastbound and westbound lanes near 128th Avenue, one of the main entrance points into Music Fest, is experiencing heavy congestion. Additionally, US 441, both northbound and southbound near 144th Drive, is also backed up with significant delays,” OSCO posted on social media.

OCSO also warned festival attendees that they should not use the GPS navigation app Waze to find the festival. “While the app is helpful in many areas, it is currently directing drivers down NE 80th Avenue, which is not a cut-through road. If you follow that route, you may end up stuck in the middle of a cow pasture,” OCSO explained.

Sgt. Jack Nash, OCSO Community Liaison, said the festival used private security to search vehicles entering the festival. The thoroughness of those searches created a bottleneck at the gates.

When OCSO noted the traffic issues, they reached out to festival security to speed things up.

“When traffic congestion became evident on Thursday, we communicated those concerns directly to festival security leadership. In response, their security supervisor made operational adjustments, including streamlining the search process, reducing the time per vehicle from approximately 10–15 minutes to around 5 minutes, and opening an additional entry portal. Those changes helped alleviate the traffic backlog within a short period of time,” he said.

Traffic flowed smoothly the rest of the festival weekend.

The 2026 festival had a mixture of people who camped for the entire weekend and those who came for one day.  “Overall, the event was well attended, with an estimated 40,000 visitors, in addition to the thousands attending the rodeo and county fair during the same timeframe. Despite that significant influx, we saw relatively minimal law enforcement issues. This was the result of coordination between our agency, our partner organizations, and the cooperation of both residents and visitors.

“We will be conducting an after-action review and will share our observations with Soundslinger to help address any foreseeable issues and improve operations moving forward,” Nash added.